Final

In this Exercise you will be playing Photoshop Tennis: a game with a partner where you’ll create a series of images that will form an emerging narrative.

We will begin with a brief Photoshop tutorial, where we’ll go through the following steps as a group. It’s important that you follow these steps carefully so that your narrative emerges as seamlessly as possible.

1) One partner should open Temporary Storage, and create name a folder with the following format: FirstName1_FirstName2. For example, if Doug Panton and I were partners, I’d make a folder called <Doug_Jesse>.

Note that we should only use images that use an appropriate form of Creative Commons license. Read over the Creative Commons information on the right. The first category (Attribution License) is the most appropriate form for our purposes. Click on “See more,” or go to:

Now, find a few images that you like (do this quickly — you’ll have a chance to redo the exercise later), and download them to your desktop. Click on “Actions > View all sizes” at the top left of the image. You want the file size that’s closest to 1024 x 768.

3) One partner should open Photoshop, and create a .psd file in with the following characteristics: 1024 x 768 pixels, 72 pixels/inch resolution, RGB 8 bit colour mode. Save this file to your folder using the same FirstName1_FirstName2 format, i.e. <Jesse_Doug.psd>.

Now, open the images you downloaded to your desktop in Photoshop. Cut-and-paste one of these images into your file to use as your background. This will begin your narrative. Cut and paste this image into your .psd file. Manipulate the image, and add content from your other images. There are many image manipulation tools in Photoshop. I’ll go over a few of them to get you started.

4) After a few minutes of playing around, you will prepare the file for transfer to your partner. Follow these instructions carefully.

Save your .psd file.

Select Save-as, select JPEG as your filetype, and change the name to FirstName1_FirstName2_FrameNumber, i.e. <Jesse_Doug_1.jpg>. In this way, you’ll end up with a .jpg “snapshot” of your .psd file at the moment of transfer.

Now, close the .psd file.

Please ask me for help if this is at all confusing. There should only ever be one .psd file per pair.

The second partner should now re-open the .psd file and add their own visual information to move the emerging narrative forward.

Don’t completely erase your partner’s work — that ruins the game and destroys the narrative. Whenever possible, use layers to separate the elements in your .psd file. This will give both partners more flexibility in re-working your collaborative creation.

5) Repeat the transfer step one more time to make sure that you understand it. This should result in a narrative that is 3 images long, and consists of four files, i.e <Jesse_Doug.psd>, <Jesse_Doug_1.jpg>, <Jesse_Doug_2.jpg>, and <Jesse_Doug_3.jpg>.

This exercise should be re-started at home, this time using transferring the .psd file a total of 5 times between you and your partner by email, resulting in a narrative that is 6 images long. In this case, step 5 reads as follows:

5) Repeat the transfer step 4 more times, progressively adding to the story until the “tennis match” is over and resulting in a narrative that is 6 frames long.

Take a moment to ensure that all your files are in order, and to post the six .jpg images in sequential order to the blog in a single post. Make sure both your names are in the post title. Be sure to adequately credit the source of your images as per the Creative Commons licence if you have not used your own images. As always, be sure to correctly categorize your post.